In 1917, the
brutal murder of the Romanov family by bolshevik soldiers in a small Siberian town was one
of modern history's most haunting and mysterious events.When I was 10, I read an article about this
horrible murder. The photo of
the room where they have been
murdered haunted my mind during many years. In that sinister
room, a whole family had been savagely murdered.It is what was supposed because, until
the recovering of their bodies in 1979, then in 2007, this historic drama was itself an enigma and
Anastasia story was only one of its numerous chapters. But today, the whole part of the
mystery collapsed and there
remains only the dramatic destiny of the last Czar of Russia.In this cellar room had been played the destiny of Russia. With the
death of the last Czar, the country was going to fall under the communist yoke for 80 long
years of a reign without equivalent in the man's history.
The theater of this drama, Ipatiev house, the
ultimate jail of the Romanovs no longer exists. It was destroyed in 1977 by communists to
avoid its becoming a pilgrimage place. Whereas it could have symbolized the duty of memory
of Russia.

Some
years ago, I practised CAD and computer graphic software a lot for
architectural projects and I decided to use this technology to rebuild this historic place
of Russian History. I thought
it could be a valuable challenge to link CAD technology to historical searchs.

During several years, I had collected documents about Ipatiev
house and in February 99, I decided to start
the project itself. It took me about 6 months from first drafts to last rendered views. I
immediately thought of a web site to present this work because my homepage, at this time
hosted by my business school, already included a section about Romanovs (actual
Historical Background, Cellar Room and photos) which had many visitors.

The first
release of Romanov-Memorial was designed in spring 1999 and was published in
September. Then, it was updated two or three time between this date and April 2001. The
present R3 release was designed between January and July 2002.

The main difficulty to rebuild Ipatiev
house was due to the lack of documents about this house. During years I collected all the
documents I could find about Romanov drama and Ipatiev house. For example, Gilliard's book
I found in a 1926 edition gave me good ground maps of the house but I thought that
Sokolov's book which was considered as the main book on the subject could teach me more.
But it was very difficult to find this book!
It was only in February 1999, during a journey in Canada that I
found Sokolov's book at Laval university.
This book included other ground maps and photos of the house but
I didn't find anything about vertical dimensions.

Besides, all existing
views of the house were perspectives which could not make it possible to estimate vertical
dimensions. I was lucky to find the right proportions after a lot of tests.
The main part was done but there was still a lot of work! Then, I
drew all house frontages, first on paper, then on CAD software. It took me about 2 months
to finish it.
The complex style of the house obliged me to simplify the
architecture a lot. You can see this 2D maps in the Outside section.
Then, having house maps, I could then start to rebuild Ipatiev
house. For this, I imported 2D

shapes in the 3D modeling programs and extruded it to obtain
volumes. Gradually, with the progress of this work, the database size of 3D objects
increased to finally reach about 4 MB with more than 100000 faces used.
The last stage of the work was to give colors and textures to
objects, choosing lighting and camera views. You can see this in the Outside tour section
of the site.
The 3D views of cellar room you can also see here were
designed in the same way but rendered with Smoothmove extensions which allows to obtain
interactive 3D views.